


All the Gloriously Frightening Light

by get_thee_to_a_nunnery



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Anal Sex, Frottage, Getting Together, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Rape Fantasy, Sexual Fantasy, background Eddie/imaginary OMCs
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-15 06:07:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29804067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/get_thee_to_a_nunnery/pseuds/get_thee_to_a_nunnery
Summary: Eddie spent his entire adult life telling himself he didn't like men. So this feeling he got sometimes when he looked at another man, or when another man looked at him, this feeling knocking the air out of his lungs and sending a sharp shiver down his spine, this feeling quickening his heartbeat and weakening his knees and causing every inch of his skin to break out in delicate goosebumps, it could only be fear. It had to be fear, right? And if Eddie found himself seeking out that feeling, that exquisite burst of adrenaline, time and time again, that was nobody's business but his, wasn't it?Until he remembered Richie.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 5
Kudos: 22





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story is going to feature internalized homophobia and some consensual non-consent kink. Let's face it, it's largely about a very repressed Eddie channeling his both his desires and his self-hatred into something he doesn't even *know* is a kink, so avoid it if either of the abovementioned things are upsetting to you.

Eddie had made a mistake.

Richie was kissing his mouth. Richie was kissing his mouth, with a big warm hand laid on the side of Eddie’s face, and Eddie felt nothing but white hot panic. He wanted to move. Couldn’t. Richie was kissing him, and Eddie’s mind was a rapidfire rattle of worst-case scenarios, likely and unlikely ways in which this could get worse, each of them uniquely and exhilaratingly terrifying, all of them completely unhelpful. Then at some point – the part of him that wasn’t screaming about the excruciating softness of Richie’s lips on his remarked that less than five seconds had passed - Richie stopped kissing him, and stepped back. He blinked, and the confused look on his face resolved into an expression of such mortified sadness that Eddie wanted… Eddie had no idea what he wanted, which was the entire problem.

’I can’t,’ he said.

‘So I gathered,’ mumbled Richie, scrubbing his mouth with the back of his hand. He was still standing too close, far too close.

Eddie tried to come up with an appropriate reaction while his heart was rapidly falling out of his chest and tunnelling through the core of the earth only to resurface from the Indian Ocean somewhere south of Madagascar. He wanted to run, to escape Richie, to escape himself, to escape the consequences of his own stupid actions… but he was in his own hotel room. He was in his own hotel room in the town where he grew up, the town where he had just narrowly escaped death, the town where he had just defeated an incomprehensible child-eating fear-guzzling monster from outside the bounds of this world. They had just defeated IT. He didn’t want to run away anymore, which meant he would have to do the mature, responsible thing. He would have to stay and apologize and dear god, talk about it.

’I’m sorry,’ said Eddie, trying to find the words. ’I didn’t… I mean I never…’

‘No, I am sorry,’ said Richie, cutting him off, clearly grasping at the opportunity to derail the whole conversation, to bury what just happened under a huge pile of words. ‘I clearly read that wrong.’

‘Kinda, yeah,’ said Eddie, trying to not think about the past day, the past gorgeous, euphoric, post-Pennywise day, trying not to think about how much of it he spent with Richie. Frantically re-evaluating everything he said and the way he said it and how close he was standing to Richie when he said it, guiltily remembering how much he touched Richie, his shoulders, his back, and of course the arm-wrestling, oh dear. How could he forget the half-drunk arm-wrestling, losing twice and asking for best out of five just so that Richie’s big warm hand would keep holding his. Eddie couldn’t help remembering that first desperate waterlogged hug at the quarry and his absolute inability to let Richie go afterwards, the need to hide his face in Richie’s neck and just breathe.

It had been a strange and terrible few days, and if the last one was less terrible, it wasn’t any less strange for the collapse of the Neibolt house and the blessed, blessed freedom from IT. Eddie had woken up early, feeling relieved and yet unnerved by the absence of fear, and he took a long sunrise walk around town, unsure if he was looking for something he had lost twenty-seven years ago, or desperately avoiding it. And then when the others awoke, they went out for brunch, only it was more like proper lunch because it was definitely past noon, and Eddie revelled in the company of people who he trusted and who trusted him, filled with a euphoric energy so strong that it was almost unpleasant, threatening to bubble out of him in a laugh or a yell or something even worse. He held onto Richie and tried to stay sane. He was unused to this much happiness, he was light-headed, drunk on it.

Brunch turned into day-drinking turned into a rambling walk turned into a long conversation, mostly ragging one another about their jobs and marriages, about the lives they spent apart, and sometime during that conversation Eddie excused himself, walked a few steps away from the other Losers, called Myra and broke up with her over the phone. Then a few minutes later his common sense reasserted itself, he excused himself again and spent half an hour talking to a lawyer, making things official. Afterwards, Bill patted him on the back, Ben honestly told him he was brave, Bev asked him for the lawyer’s phone number and Richie said nothing.

Then they drank some more, except for Ben who was trying not to go overboard, and got dinner, and talked, and talked, and talked like they had decades to make up for. Eddie spent the whole evening pressed against Richie’s side in a small restaurant booth, then draped against him in a hotel bar, feeling both more calm and more excited than he’d ever been, feeling, for the first time in decades, somehow, right. It was quite late in the evening when everyone decided to go back to their respective rooms, except for Ben who apparently decided to go back to Bev’s room. That meant Eddie found himself alone in the lobby with Richie, Richie who was suddenly in a real hurry to leave. And Eddie didn’t want him to leave. On a rational level, he knew the day would end, and soon he would have to return to his life, or to whatever he made of his life. But for just a little longer, he wanted to keep feeling like this, feeling light and strange and scared and always on the brink of laughter, so he grabbed Richie’s arm and dragged him up to his own hotel room for one more drink. And that is where Richie kissed him.

‘Not your fault,’ Eddie said finally. He could see what it must have looked like. He felt dizzy, imagining what it must have looked like, what Richie must have thought about him. Eddie realized he owed Richie an explanation, but when it dawned on him what exactly he would have to explain, he was once again seized by an almost irresistible urge to run. The euphoria he felt earlier in the day was quite gone, and all he felt was cold, clammy shame.

‘Should I leave?’ Richie asked, very gently, very politely, with great sadness. He asked like the whole thing was his fault. ‘Do you want me to leave?’

‘Yes,’ said Eddie immediately, then closed his mouth and breathed through his nose until he mustered the courage to force out the correct answer. ‘No. Stay.’

‘All right, I’ll stay,’ Richie said, his shoulders hunched as if he were trying to make himself as small as possible. He looked around for a place to sit, found only one chair, didn’t want to hog it, clearly decided against sitting on the bed, and ended up sitting cross-legged on the floor.

‘I’m sorry,’ Eddie repeated, sitting down on the bed. Sitting on the bed, he was barely taller than Richie sitting on the floor. Something about that felt… actually quite lovely, but Eddie didn’t dare examine why.

‘So. Not your fault, I was seized by momentary insanity, it’s over now, you don’t like me, you don’t like men, I get it, I will not fuck up ever again, pinkie promise,’ rattled off Richie, as if he was trying to pre-empt the more painful parts of the conversation.

‘But you like…’ attempted Eddie. ‘You do like men.’

Richie nodded.

‘I could tell you funny anecdotes about my ex-girlfriends, or profess my undying love for your dead mother, and if I tried real hard, I could probably sell it, I mean you’d believe me, or at least you’d laugh and agree to trop the subject,’ he equivocated. ‘But I’m very tired of my own bullshit, so yeah. I like men. This is me, having come out. Bring on the parade.’

Richie made an expansive hand gesture that looked like he was throwing confetti, or possibly impersonating a rainbow.

Eddie was silent. He should have said something, about how it was all right, about how grateful he was that Richie told him, about how they were still friends, but the words stuck in his throat. Richie liked men. He felt surprised at how unsurprised he was, as if he had already known this. But there was a huge difference between suspecting something and saying it out loud, and Eddie suddenly understood what he was going to have to do, what he would inevitably do, no matter how little he wanted to do it. He sat on the edge of the bed, arms wrapped around himself, rigid with the horrible nerve-racking fear of what came next, concentrating all of his willpower, unsure if he was trying to force himself to speak or trying to work up the courage to bite his own tongue off.

‘Eddie?’ asked Richie, sounding concerned, sounding gentle and careful and quite impossible to deal with.

‘Oh god,’ said Eddie, and he hated how much his voice was shaking. ‘I don’t even know how to say this…’


	2. Chapter 2

‘I don’t like men,’ Eddie said. ‘I don’t like men, it’s just…’

And that was approximately where he ran out of words.

Eddie didn’t like men. Eddie did like women, in the sense that he was willing to go on dates with them when his work friends set him up with someone suitable, and he had a vague idea that he would marry one, eventually. So he liked women, but he wasn’t particularly excited about them. He also wasn’t particularly excited about sex. He had it a few times at college, with a very nice girl he had been dating, and it wasn’t unpleasant, not at all. It was an acceptable way to spend half an hour, but it was less efficient than jerking off, and jerking off was less efficient than just going to sleep and forgetting about the whole thing.

Eddie didn’t really think about sex. If he ever tallied it up, he would have found that he thought about sexually transmitted diseases about fifteen times more often than he thought about sex. He worried about a lot of illnesses that he had virtually no chance of catching, diseases that were transmitted by cannibalism or rare subtropical fish or, well, sex. Eddie didn’t really think about sex, not in general, and especially not in specific, as in, with specific women. He could vaguely tell if a woman was supposed to be attractive, but he didn’t check them out unless they were pointed out to him. Bodies were just bodies, and sex was just a mildly tedious bodily activity, not something to lose any sleep over. Eddie spent thirty years of his life quite unconcerned about the whole topic, and he didn’t expect that to change.

Which is why that one moment in the showers was so jarring. It happened when he was in his early thirties, once he was already promoted into his current job, and financially stable enough to afford a proper gym. He was walking into the showers after a gruelling cardio workout, and another guy was walking out of the showers, still drying himself, sort-of but not entirely covered by the towel. Eddie only caught one glimpse, one brief accidental glimpse of the guy, his thick arms, his broad chest, the dark fuzz of hair visible where the towel rode low on his hips. He looked away immediately, but in the mirror, he saw the guy quirk a little smile, and he couldn’t help thinking that he had been caught looking. Eddie quickly walked on, hung up his own towel, took his place under the corner showerhead and started the water. His heart was hammering harder than it had on the ellipticals, even when he had really pushed himself. Had he been caught looking? It was unfair, he wasn’t looking, not really, and the guy clearly thought he was, and now he would… now he would what? Eddie was torn between the impulse to avoid the worst option, and the impulse to imagine it in great detail. What would the guy do?

To buy himself time, Eddie squirted some soap into his hand and started lathering himself up. What would the guy do? He would come after Eddie, he would corner him and crowd him and say _I know you were looking at me. You were checking me out._ And Eddie would try to deny it, but the guy wouldn’t believe him. The guy would stand there in the now-empty shower room, so much taller than Eddie, so much broader, so close, and he would advance on Eddie, press him into the wall, say _I saw you fucking staring at me_. And Eddie would say _no, no I wasn’t_ , but the guy would just laugh at him and rub himself all over Eddie saying _is this what you wanted, is this what you came here for_?

God, where did that thought come from? He was pretty sure the guy wouldn’t do that, at worst he would yell at Eddie, or maybe call security, but he probably wasn’t going to do any of that, because if he was going to, he would already have done so. The guy wasn’t going to do that, but Eddie was standing there in the shower, rock hard and queasy with something that felt almost entirely like fear. He was standing in the corner, he was facing the wall, the showers were empty, he was fine, nobody saw him, but what if, what if… Oh no, what if the guy saw that he was hard? What would he do then? The guy would sneer and call him a little pervert and tell him _you really want this, don’t you_ , and grab him. And Eddie would say no, of course he would, and try to fight him off, but the guy was so much bigger, Eddie would have no chance.

Eddie’s heart was beating so hard in his chest that he felt dizzy. He was still washing himself, ostensibly, but he didn’t dare allow his hands below the waist, afraid that if he touched himself he might, well, _touch himself,_ right here, in the public gym, with half a dozen men behind a thin wall and an unlocked door, he could hear them, which meant they could hear him. They might come in, any moment. He couldn’t risk that, so instead he just passed his soapy hands over and over his chest, trying to get his bearings, feeling his nipples harden and begin to ache. Even the slightest, the gentlest touch crashed into him like a wave of want, bringing with it stupid images of the guy’s hand tight around Eddie’s wrist, around his throat, around his cock. _I don’t want this_ , he told himself, as his left hand pinched and rolled his nipple. _I don’t want this_ , he thought as his cock jumped again and again under the teasing pressure of the shower spray. His hips rocked into it a little… no. Eddie took a deep breath, then another deep breath, then turned the water all the way to cold.

He wasn’t proud of the yelp that came out of his mouth when the freezing water hit his skin. Still, it was worth it. A few seconds later, his dick was sufficiently limp, his mind respectfully blank, and his whole body shivering so hard that it overrode the previous, excruciation tension. Eddie briskly towelled himself off, got dressed, walked out of the gym, and did not think of the whole incident for days.

But then, a few days later, in his own home, in his own shower, he had a strange moment of déja vu while soaping up his chest. His nails caught on a nipple, and as a stray spark of pleasure shivered through him, he couldn’t help wondering. He wondered if the guy from the gym, the guy he had really not looked at, would break into his flat just to teach him a lesson, just to punish him for looking, to punish him for getting hard and thinking all those things. It was stupid, he knew it was stupid, he knew nobody would do that, and even if they did, he knew he didn’t have to fear home invaders, having bought locks and home alarm systems that were excellent to the point of paranoia. But knowing it was stupid didn’t help at all, his heart was beating so hard he could feel it in his toes and he couldn’t breathe and he needed his inhaler and the guy could come right in, come in and see him gasping and shivering naked in the shower. Eddie needed his inhaler but the guy would just scoff _I’ll tell you what you need_ and manhandle him, turn him around to face the shower wall. Eddie would fight, Eddie would try to turn around, but the guy would pin him with his sheer weight, his warm wet hairy body, press him into the cold wet tiles, not even let him turn his head. And Eddie would feel, against his ass or the small of his back, the guy’s cock, big and hot and hard and oh god, Eddie would trash in fear and rage, but of course that wouldn’t help. The guy would hold him firm, and laugh at him, and all Eddie’s wriggling would only make him harder. And he would keep rolling his hips into Eddie, crushing him into the wet tiles, rubbing Eddie’s helplessly hard dick into the wall over and over again, too much and never enough. And Eddie would cry with shame and frustration, hating that he was hard and wanting a hand around his cock nonetheless, wanting any sort of friction, trapped underneath a stranger who wouldn’t let him go and wouldn’t let him come. But if the guy put a hand on his hip and asked _do you want this_ , if he pinched Eddie’s nipples and asked _do you need this_ , if he sped up and ground Eddie’s aching dick into the wall with rapid, breathless little thrusts, growling _tell me you need this_ , Eddie would still have enough left of himself to refuse, to not give in, to say _no, no, fuck no_.

‘Fuck no,’ groaned Eddie as he came all over the shower wall, his hips stuttering against the slippery tiles. He had both his hands flat on the wall, which was useful when his legs gave out for good. For a few shaky, disoriented seconds afterwards, he felt pretty good about himself, and he allowed himself to enjoy the warm, melting sensation of afterglow. It felt like a reward of sorts, for having resisted, for having said no.

But then ten more seconds passed, reality reasserted itself, and Eddie was hit by the disgust. Jerking off was disgusting enough to begin with, jerking off to a strange man was worse, and jerking off to someone he wasn’t even attracted to, someone he was merely afraid of, was simply sick. He consoled himself with the thought that he didn’t really touch himself, the whole thing happened without his hand going anywhere near his cock, but he figured rubbing his cock on the shower wall wasn’t exactly better. It may have been worse. The fear and the exhilaration and the strangeness of it all left him reeling, so he rinsed himself off, and tried to put it out of his mind. It was just nerves, he told himself. He had a scare, and the this is how the adrenaline worked itself out of his system. Probably happens to everyone.

He couldn’t go back to that gym though.

(That much he managed to tell Richie. He managed to explain the man and the looking and the shower and the shame, but he couldn’t quite get to the bit where he liked it, the bit where he came. He hoped Richie would figure it out from his silences, from the burning of his ears.)


	3. Chapter 3

‘Yeah, so I didn’t go back to the gym,’ Eddie mumbled. ‘That’s when I took up running.’

He took up running and he forgot about the whole incident and he let his guard down. He wasn’t prepared for it to happen again, and so it hurt that much more when it did. The first time he saw the dude, he didn’t think much of it, just another man on the running trail, a burly guy in a black T-shirt advertising some death metal band in an unreadable font. The problem was that the guy was a pretty good runner. And since Eddie was doing a meticulously crafted interval training program (for cardiovascular health), and death metal guy also varied his speed quite a lot, they ended up passing each other a lot, first one pulling ahead, then another, over and over again for a good half an hour. After the fifth time, it started being a little bit funny, greeting each other with an out-of-breath nod. It was fine.

Things only started to go wrong when Eddie stopped to stretch, and death metal guy stopped only a few feet away. Eddie was still breathing hard and covered in sweat and aching all over and a little bit dizzy with runner’s high, and that is why he spaced out for a few seconds. He wasn’t looking at the other man, he would swear that under oath, but he still saw him, saw the man’s legs, his big thick runner’s thighs and his unacceptably short shorts, saw the sweat stain on his T-shirt where the fabric stuck to his skin, saw the blissful grin on his face as he took out a water bottle and poured half of it on his face, and the rest of it in his mouth. Envy, Eddie decided. He envied how fit the other guy was, how much bigger and stronger and more athletic, that’s why it took him a good ten seconds to tear his eyes away. It made sense that Eddie, slight and scrawny as he was, would feel a little rush of excited anger at the sight of him. But the man didn’t know that. And he’s think Eddie was staring at him, even though he wasn’t. What would he do?

He’s almost twice my size, thought Eddie. He could overpower me easily, thought Eddie. There is nothing I could do, thought Eddie. There’s nobody here, nobody would see us, nobody would help, thought Eddie, feeling a burst of adrenaline so strong it was almost euphoric.

‘Are you all right?’ asked the death metal guy, and his voice was deep and scratchy and good in a quite terrifying way. He was standing too close. Eddie could smell the warm strong smell of his sweat. He felt his knees go weak and his cock begin to fill up quite against his will as he thought of the guy stepping closer, feigning concern to put a hand on him, then forcing him down, down among the undergrowth, giving him what he swore he didn’t need…

Eddie turned and ran. He didn’t stop to look if the other man was following. He ran hard, harder than he should have, harder than he would have thought himself capable of, especially not after the workout he’d just had. This wasn’t a rewarding run where the burning in his lungs and legs gradually gave way to the joy of speed, this was an uncoordinated sprint fuelled by pure terror. All Eddie wanted was to get away and get home, but he didn’t dare run straight home for fear that the guy might follow him, he had to circle around and go home the long way.

When he arrived home, half an hour later, he was wheezing piteously and in quite a lot of pain. He was a runner, he knew his limits, and today he had blown past them in a really unsafe way. He should have paced himself, he knew that, but whenever he had thought of slowing down, he imagined the black-shirted death metal guy right behind him, grinning wolfishly, speeding up, catching up, tackling him, bearing him down, snarling _look at you, you wanted this_. On some level, he knew that the man was not following him, and that even if the man had been following him, he would certainly have done nothing of the sort, not on a busy street in broad daylight. But that didn’t change the fact that Eddie needed to outrun him. He needed to prove that he didn’t want to get caught, he didn’t.

He had outran the man, he had gotten away, he had won, he was safe home, but as he was unlacing his shoes, he couldn’t help his mind jumping back to that moment over and over again, Eddie looking at the man and the man asking if he was all right, repeating forever like some terrible glitch of the imagination. Eddie should have felt strong, as he usually did after running, but this time he felt raw and weak and very aware that if the man had wanted to take him, there was very little he could have done. He drank some water, and his memory flashed to the man’s face with sweat and water running down it, slicking his hair to his face, to the man’s throat as he swallowed. To the man’s voice saying _are you all right_ , to the man’s voice saying _I know what you need_ , him saying _I’ll give it to you_.

Eddie tried not to think of anything as he made his way to the bathroom, but his mind rebelled and inexorably showed him image after image of the man grabbing him and forcing him to the ground. As he started peeling himself out of his sweat-sodden running clothes, he suddenly knew that that’s what the man would have done next, slide a hand underneath his running shirt to touch the tacky skin of his chest, to feel the panicked heaving of his lungs. The man would have yanked off his running shorts, then pulled his boxers down, leaving him exposed, ass up in the dirt. _Let me go_ , Eddie would yell, and trash as hard as he could, but the man would sit on him, maybe twist his arm, immobilize him. Eddie tried very hard not to imagine what would happen next, thought _stop it, stop it_ , but the man would just laugh at him and not stop, he wouldn’t stop even if Eddie begged him, even if Eddie threatened him.

He would fuck Eddie.

‘God no,’ whined Eddie and wrapped his hand around his cock. ‘I don’t want this.’ But it didn’t matter if he wanted it. The man would hold him down and put his cock into him, no matter what Eddie thought or said or did. The man would put his cock into him, fill him up, stretch him out, and it would hurt so much, it would hurt so very very much but Eddie would be brave, Eddie wouldn’t make a sound. The man would lie on him, cover him completely, pin his arms to the ground as he fucked him hard and deep, saying _tell me you want this_ , saying _tell me you like this_ , saying _show me how much you like this, come on, make some noise_. But Eddie, Eddie would say _fuck you_ , and he would say _I don’t want this_ , only the words came out in a terrible shaky moan, they sounded unconvincing, they sounded like Eddie actually wanted to have a dick in him, like Eddie wanted more.

Hearing his own voice sound like that was excruciatingly embarrassing, and it flooded Eddie with a desperation he had never experienced before. He staggered under the weight of it and had to grab onto the sink to steady himself as he almost doubled over with weakness and want. His other hand sped up, yanking at his cock in an angry, punishing pace as he stupidly, incongruously wished he could have something up his ass, something big, something painful so that he could prove that he could take it without crying out. He could take it, even if the guy held him down and pushed his face into the ground and drove into him harder with every thrust, so hard it felt like splitting Eddie in half, and Eddie wouldn’t give him the satisfaction, Eddie would bite his lips and swallow his cries down into little quiet whimpers, making sure that the guy knew he _didn’t want this_ , remaining quiet even as he… as he…

Eddie tasted blood as he came, and came, and came, pleasure hitting him in spasms so overwhelming they bent him double. When it finally passed, his legs were shaking so hard he had to sit down on the bathroom floor. His running shorts were still around his ankles. He hadn’t made it to the shower, his come was splattered all over under-sink cabinet in a disgusting smear, and he knew he needed to get up, clean himself then deep clean the bathroom, but he wasn’t ready to move yet. He felt sick and relieved at the same time. The whole thing had felt a lot like throwing up, like heaving and heaving to get something terrible out of his system. But it was out now, whatever it was, and Eddie was himself again.

But of course it wasn’t, and he wasn’t, and he couldn’t explain this to Richie, not properly. He could tell Richie about the fear, but he couldn’t tell Richie about his own terrible weakness in the face of it, not really. He couldn’t talk about the worst part, the best part, the important part, he couldn’t talk about _giving in._


End file.
